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When a Zuleteña thinks about her Sanjuanes, her thoughts are boundless. She spends significant sums in relation to her salary, she loses concentration, she daydreams and asks for her two-weeks’ vacation. If she doesn’t get them, she will disappear anyway from this everyday world to return to her family, to her homeland… she will be swallowed up by memory. She will sit beside her grandmother, beside her comadre and her sisters; she will get her singing voice ready; she will be fit to walk from one side of her eternal valley to the other, chanting, stomping her feet day in and night out, urging dancers to keep going with tasteful delicacies she learned from her ancestors with the culinary secrets of a wordless recipe book, with her most colorful dress, her finest embroidery, her whitest blouse. Her language, somewhere in between medieval Castilian and ancestral Kichwa; her dress, somewhere in between Andalusia and Karanki; her entire being, somewhere in between heaven and earth, reality and fiction; her fiesta, somewhere in between meaning and sheer entertainment… she will not leave it for the world.
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